With the failure of Cap-and-Trade legislation, so-called smart meters (representing a power takeover), are being forced upon consumers by electric utilities, including Illinois’ ComEd, as just another technology that will achieve government-sponsored extortion of American citizens. It was in 2009 that the U.S. government allocated $11B of taxpayer funds from the 2009 bailout package to develop a “smart” grid, including “smart” meters for every home’s electricity, gas and water. Accordingly, smart meters have now become an integral part of the infrastructure to implement U.N. Agenda 21, the resulting document of the 1992 Rio Conference in Brazil (Informal name: The Earth Summit), whose principal themes are the environment and sustainable development. President George H. Bush represented this nation, along with 172 other nations, 108 at the level of heads of State or Government.

Smart meter defined:Smart meters are digital meters utilities are using to replace current mechanical meters. As smart meters can control the amount of energy used, their use ties in with the Obama administration’s efforts to reign in CO2 emissions as the cause of manmade Global Warming. While both look similar, a mechanical meter has a rotating wheel to calculate energy usage in contrast to a smart meter which uses a digital read out. That is where the similarity ends. As this article cites:

Smart meters may be “smart” but they are not private. Once a smart meter is attached to a home, it can tell how many people live in the house, when they get up, when they go to bed, and when they aren’t home. I can tell how many showers they take and loads of laundry they do, how often they use the microwave and how much and what kind of TV they watch. The information gathered from your house is sent to a neighborhood smart meter which then wirelessly transmits your information to a municipal network and to the national network which is the Smart Grid.

Where smart meters have already been installed, some utility companies have already established three main time categories at which kilowatt hours will be billed: on peak, mid-peak and off-peak, with peak time almost twice as expensive as off-peak time. As off-peak is often given at 9:00 at night, keeping electric bills down would mean cooking, bathing, running the washer or dryer, having heat or air conditioning until after 9:00 at night. There is every possibility that eventually the utility companies will control how much energy we use and when. Going a step further, it is not unreasonable to believe that in the future smart chip-equipped appliances could be developed that could be shut off remotely.

The hysteria over the transition to 20th century metering reminds me of the dire predictions made over the death of the carburetor. I’m an energy consultant for a major manufacturing plant (one of ComEd’s largest customers), and if I gave you a month’s worth of logged meter data from the facitilies’ 9 meters, you wouldn’t be able to derive any sort of meaningful information beyond a rudimentary guess at production levels. And, this facility has saved millions of dollars since these meters were installed about 5 years ago.

I switched my home metering to a datalogging meter about 3 years ago, and have saved over $1300 vs. fixed-rate pricing.

I like fuel injection, and I like digital meters. But, my ‘like’ isn’t really what matters; ‘my’ meter is the sole property of the utility, and they have every right to install whatever they want, just as they have the right to determine how they calculate charges – my right is to purchase or not purchase their product. It’s past time for companies to demand protection from nanny state government. Free market good, nanny state bad.